On May 11, 1944, her birthday, Nazis rousted Eva Schloss and her family from hiding. Soon, they were on a train — cattle cars stuffed with humans — from Holland to Auschwitz, the death camp in Poland.

Eva was 15.

Listening to this small but steely woman at RCC Saturday night, I kept coming back to that number. Fifteen when she saw her brother for the last time. Fifteen when she stood in Auschwitz as Nazis decided who’d be gassed. Fifteen when she and her mother sifted the trash for carrot tops to bolster a daily ration of soup and bread.

“We assumed we were going to die,” Schloss has said. But as long as she was alive, there was hope. She brought that hope to a nearly packed 1,300-seat Landis Auditorium thanks to the Chabad Jewish Community Center of Riverside. She was billed as Anne Frank’s stepsister (they met in Holland, but weren’t close; Anne’s dad, Otto, married Eva’s mom after Anne died in a concentration camp).

But Eva Schloss, now 83, has her own story. She told it with chilling low drama (the horrifying details spoke for themselves) and easy humor (a daughter’s typical spats with her mom even as they hid from Nazis). She brought some to tears, reading a poem by her brother, who worried about dying young. Heinz died at 17. Her father perished, too. Eva survived, but the ordeal made her an atheist and filled her with hatred and a yearning to speak when no one wanted to hear about the Holocaust. Yet, a young girl’s hidden diary, published in the U.S. in 1952, became a bestseller. Anne Frank’s entries stopped when Nazis captured her.

“It wasn’t a Holocaust book,” Schloss said days before her RCC talk. “It was a period piece, but more really a developing of the mind of a young girl living through difficult times, especially for Jews. She still believed in the goodness of mankind.”

Both saw the evil. Felt it. In 1986, when Schloss finally began to speak, audiences wanted to listen. “The world still can’t comprehend how the Germans, the most intelligent, cultivated people could commit such a horrible crime …The world knew what Hitler was up to but nobody wanted to stop him.”

Her hatred for Germans and enablers subsided after Otto Frank convinced her how self-destructive it was. But her conviction that the story must be told holds firm, especially in the face of Holocaust deniers, whom she dismisses as attention-seekers who should be ignored.

Schloss stopped believing in God when her death-camp prayers went unanswered. She found God again when her first daughter was born. Our future is her message. When she talks of Auschwitz, she sometimes catches glimpses of “fathers taking the hands of their daughters or putting their arms around them.” Before Mayor Rusty Bailey gave Schloss a city proclamation, he offered an unscripted thank you, explaining his own daughter was about to turn 11.

A tough, courageous woman visited Riverside to tell a 70-year-old story of intolerance, unspeakable inhumanity and survival. By reliving the past, Eva Schloss shines a light on paths we and our children must take — and avoid — tomorrow.